Will Lawrence, co-founder and CTO of Iron Sheepdog, likes to say that sometimes building something simple can be very difficult. Building easy-to-use technology for the short-haul trucking industry is Iron Sheepdog's goal. This approach is also why the company believes it has been able to see a level of adoption from the industry that its competitors have not seen.
The Williamsburg, Va.-based company's software looks to make the short-haul trucking space, which largely involves outsourcing short-haul jobs to truck drivers booked through brokers, more streamlined and efficient. Companies can track their contracted trucks through Iron Sheepdog, giving them more transparency on where the trucks are located, how long a job will take and how much they need to pay. Truck drivers themselves get an easy-to-use app that helps them accept jobs and get paid online.
This week, Iron Sheepdog announced a $10 million Series B round led by SJF Ventures with participation from Grand Ventures, Supply Chain Ventures and strategic partners. Mike Van Sickle, co-founder and CEO of Iron Sheepdog, told TechCrunch that the company spent its first few years making sure it could gain customer adoption and achieve profitability. Now it's looking to expand.
“Confidence is the most important quality; “We have to get the subcontractor to actually use the app,” Van Sickle said. “All available solutions imposed by contractors [subhaulers] To use, if they are not willing to embrace it, you create more problems.
The idea for Iron Sheepdog came from the lived experience of the three founders, Van Sickle said. None of them worked as short-term truck drivers, but rather worked for the companies that employed them. Although there are software solutions for every other part of their business, there isn't a great solution for hiring short-haul truck drivers, Van Sickle said. The current process has frustrated both sides.
Although it's not the first company to try to create software to manage short-haul truck drivers, Iron Sheepdog has been able to see its growth double every year since its founding. This is because it approached construction differently from its competitors. Instead of focusing on contractors to drive adoption, they started with short-haul truck drivers themselves.
“We chose to look at the problem from the bottom up rather than the top down,” Van Sickle said. “We created a very simple app for the sub-haul and connected it to 24-hour pay. I call it simple. It was intentionally simple for them to adopt.”
Persuading truck drivers to sign up for the free app prompts the brokers who provide their jobs to sign up and strengthens the chain. Contractors want to sign up, too, because they know the app gives them access to a network of more than 4,000 short-haul truck drivers. The company makes money as these contractors pay their primary truck drivers through the platform.
Now that they have a large number of brokers and truck drivers on the platform, companies can start making better use of them, Van Sickle said. For example, a company can rent a truck to do two jobs on the same day or deliver materials to two locations, reducing the number of trucks needed. This can also help reduce emissions.
“If you think about Uber Eats, an Uber driver doesn't leave their house, pick up the sandwich, go to your house, and then come home. That's not how the industry works,” Van Sickle said. “Once you get in these trucks, you can start finding Ways to get better use of those trucks.”
The Iron Sheepdog Tour stood out for several reasons. For example, investment in construction technology startups has increased in recent years, but this part of the ecosystem has not received the same attention. What good is software that speeds up job site planning if coordinating trucks to get the job done will slow down the process?
Innovation in trucking has largely ignored this area as well. Companies looking to build self-driving construction vehicles and companies looking to overhaul last-mile freight operations already exist, but much less of the technology is dedicated to dump trucks and their equivalents. There are other companies looking to help solve this problem, including TruckIT and Loadtraxx, but Iron Sheepdog seems to be one of the few, if not the only, venture-backed startups tackling this problem.
Also noteworthy is Iron Sheepdog's focus on adoption. While it seems obvious that companies should create products that the organizations they target will actually use, this doesn't always happen, and there are a lot of industries that remain lagging behind in technology as a result.
There is nothing good about new technology if no one uses it.
“It has to be crawl-walk-run style, it can't be crawl-run style,” Van Sickle said. “There is a disconnect between some of the software solutions that are developed and the willingness of the people who will actually use them to adopt them.”
